Page:The Legalisation of Female Slavery in England.pdf/5

. By prostitution I mean simply and solely physical union sold by one sex and bought by the other, with no love, no respect, no reverence on either side. Of this, physical degradation and mental degradation are the invariable accompaniments: just as intoxication may be sometimes indulged in without leaving perceptible and permanent bad effects, but, persisted in, destroys body and brain, so may sexual irregularity be practised for a time with little apparent injury, but, persisted in, destroys as fatally as intoxication. This is no matter of theory, it is simply a matter of observation; individuals whose lives are irregular, nations where prostitution is widespread, lose stamina, virility, physical development, the whole type becoming degraded. It is urged that "man's physical wants must be satisfied, and therefore prostitution is a necessity". Why therefore? It might as well be argued, man's hunger must be appeased, and therefore theft of food is a necessity. The two things have no necessary connexion with each other. Does prostitution promote the national health? If so, why this necessity for legislation to check the spread of contagious diseases? Those diseases spring from sexual irregularities, and are an outraged Nature's protest against the assertion that prostitution is the right method of providing for the sexual necessities of man. As surely as typhoid results from filth and neglect, so does the scourge of syphilis follow in the wake of prostitution. These unfortunate women who are offered up as victims of man's pleasure, these poor white slaves sold for man's use, these become their own avengers, repaying the degradation inflicted on them, and spreading ruin and disease among those for whose wants they exist as a class. Mrs. Butler truly writes: "You can understand how the men who have riveted the slavery of women for such degrading ends become, in a generation or two, themselves the greater slaves; not only the slaves of their own enfeebled and corrupted natures, but of the women whom they have maddened, hardened, and stamped under foot. Bowing down before the unrestrained dictates of their own lusts, they now bow down also before the tortured and fiendish womanhood which they have created. They plot and plan in vain for their own physical safety. Possessed at times with a sort of stampede of terror, they rush to International Congresses, and forge together more chains for the dreaded wild beast they have so carefully trained, and in their pitiful panic build up fresh barricades between themselves and that womanhood which they proclaim to be a 'permanent source of sanitary danger'." Mrs. Butler was writing from Paris, where the system is carried out which we have in England in only a few towns. If any one doubts the reality of this natural retribution, let him go and watch the streets where many of these poor ruined creatures may be found, and there see what women are when transformed into prostitutes—a source of disease instead of health, of vice instead of purity. Each one might have been the centre of a happy home, the mother of brave men and women who would have served the Fatherland, and we have made them this.

National morality and national health go hand-in-hand; a vicious nation will be a weak nation, and when a government begins to